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Wednesday, 9 September 2015

A perfect start to the day, thanks to a neighbour's dog, builders, Juncker and Serena Williams

Jean-Claude Wancker

The neighbours two doors down allowed their dog to scream hysterically at their front gate for ten minutes.

The workmen next door started up a drill so loud it might as well have been been inserted directly into my left ear.

The newspaper hadn’t been delivered.

That vision of loveliness, grace, charm and enormous orange bloomers, Serena Williams, had amazed the world by beating her sister at the US Open (cue jackknifed body, clenched fist, and a repellent shrieking noise not unlike the one produced by our neighbour’s dog).
I then discovered that one of the BBC’s resident Labour Party publicists (otherwise known as political correspondents), Norman Smith, is now being billed as “Political Guru” on Victoria Derbyshire's News Channel leftyfest. (WTF?)

Then, just as I was tucking into my breakfast kipper, Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission (bow your heads in reverent silence), loftily dismissed comments addressed to him by UKIP leader Nigel Farage as “worthless”. Yes, an unelected Luxembourgish nonentity (a tautology, obviously) contemptuously brushing aside the views of the man whose party topped the UK’s European elections last year and received almost four million votes at this year’s general election – i.e. seven times more votes than there are Luxembourgers, and almost four million more votes than Jean-Claude Sodding Juncker needed to become the European continent’s Dear Leader.

As Juncker was laying down the law on migrants, and as a YouGov poll this weekend suggested that more than half of UK voters are in full agreement with Nigel Farage in his desire not to accept Syrian economic migrants, Juncker was essentially telling Britons that their views are “worthless”. Mind you, Juncker’s only following the lead of David Cameron, and, given his well-known problems with alcohol, the European Commission President’s rudeness may have been the result of a stinking hangover (he certainly looked like he could do with a lie-down).

A three-way webchat ensued (Sky or the BBC - can't remember), involving a very sensible Hungarian, an Austrian woman (who actually told us that her heart was bleeding – I’m not kidding) and some ghastly posturing French pillock who, instead of addressing any of the sensible factual points being raised by the Hungarian chap, kept ranting on about how Hungary should be “ashamed” of trying to control migrants – before conceding that France should also be “ashamed” of how it treats migrants at Calais (i.e. we are all to blame in a very real sense).

I switched over to a documentary about the Queen becoming the longest-serving British monarch (God bless you, Ma’am) and contemplated the mystery of why being ruled by unelected foreigners – i.e. British monarchs from 1688 onwards – has, on the whole, worked so extraordinarily well for this country, despite at least one of them going mad, two of them being randy libertines, one of them locking themselves away from public view for decades following the death of her German husband, one or two of them being really quite thick, and several of the early ones barely speaking the lingo. On paper, the EU looks like a rational idea (especially if you’re left-wing), but is nevertheless a disaster for its member states and the world as a whole. On paper, the British monarchy looks like a completely irrational, unworkable, bonkers idea (especially if you’re left-wing) – and yet it just somehow works. Go figure.

As for Mr. Juncker, I recommend a massive fry-up, lashing of sugary coffee and orange juice, and a good long kip, followed by reading the complete works of Edmund Burke and Friedrich Hayek. After that, I'd like him to produce a 5,000-word essay on why there is all the difference in the world between allowing tens of thousands of, say, Jews and Christians into Western Europe on the one hand, and tens of thousands of mainly young male Muslims on the other. Religion does have something to do with it, you raving idiot. And how dare you conflate the concept of our shared European heritage - which you are evidently so keen to throw away - and what you and your fellow Eurocrats insist on referring to as the European "project": the latter is proving itself to be incompatible with the former, and I know which one I prefer.